This image is for the book I’m doing with my friend, the most excellent Nubby Twiglet.

I am drawing based off her photoreference, and She is doing layout for the book.

Step One: Outlines.

Most of this was pretty simple, but I had a hard time with the necklace. I wanted the lines to look really clean so it would come across as plastic more convincingly.

Step two – Rudimentary coloring.

Flat coloring, with a little ink spatter to make it look more organic. I do all my work digitally, so I often try to work in elements of the hand-drawn to give the image more life.

Step three – Shadows

This was many hours of building up shading. ugh. This was one of the first images I did using the pressure sensitivity on my tablet to control the opacity of my brush strokes. It’s really, really easy for this coloring method to look super-digital in a way I don’t like at all, so I usually take a really long time. I’m really happy with the shadows on the mouth.

Step four – Highlights.

Only minor changes on the skin tone, but the lipgloss is much improved.

Step 5 – Final Touches.

The original photoreference nubby gave me just had a black background, but I decided that it needed a little something so I drew some strands of hair in. I added a little more ink spatter, this time in grey, to break up the background.